Description

If you make a function call indirectly by invoking a Var object (which derefs itself and invokes the result), the invocation parameters remain in the thread's local stack for the duration of the function call, even though they are needed only long enough to be passed into the deref'd function. As a result, passing a lazy seq into a function invoked in its Var form may run out of memory if the seq is forced inside that function. For example:

(defn total [xs] (reduce + 0 xs))
(total (range 1000000000)) ; this works, though takes a while
(#'total (range 1000000000)) ; this dies with out of memory error

Solution: Similar to RestFn, wrap each argN in Var inside a Util.ret1(argN, argN = null).

Timothy Baldridge
added a comment - 29/Nov/12 2:57 PM - edited adding a patch. Since most of Clojure ends up running this code in one way or another, I'd assert that tests are included as part of the normal Clojure test process.
Patch simply calls Util.ret1(argx, argx=null) on all invoke calls.

Patch var-clear-locals-patch-v2.txt is identical to var-clear-locals.diff (and preserves credit to its author), except it eliminates trailing whitespace in some added lines that cause git to give warnings when applying the patch.